Uniden HomePatrol 1 & 2 Engineered Databases

This page contains engineered databases for the Uniden HomePatrol 1 & 2 scanners for the Washington DC metropolitan area.  More areas may be added in the future.

The Uniden HomePatrol 1 & 2 scanners use a revolutionary concept in scanners with it's geotagged database.  This allows the location to determine what is being actively scanned.  The listener can set the geographical location of the scanner in several ways.  You can enter the zip code, a city and state, let the scanner search what it hears to roughly determine your location, or connect it to a GPS receiver for the most accurate determination of your location.

Click here for tips on connecting your HomePatrol 1 or 2 to a GPS receiver.

Click here for tips on installing your HomePatrol 1 or 2 in a vehicle.

Click here to learn more about how the location drives what the scanner listens to.

To support this novel concept, the radio reference database has been geotagged with longitude and latitude of most entries in it's database.  This has been a huge effort on their part, and the results are amazing.

What is different about my databases is they combine local knowledge and some engineering to provide geotagging that better reflect what primary PD and FD channels you would be interested in listening to.  When connected to a GPS receiver, my databases have the capability to determine the exact jurisdiction to be scanned, and even the police district you are in.  It has been broken down by police district and in conjunction with Google maps accurate locations have been geotagged both by jurisdiction and district.  The result is when you drive around with a GPS connected, you will almost always have the correct jurisdiction selected and almost always the correct police district selected to listen to.  The radio reference database just doesn't have this much detail in it.

My databases are geotagged to the center of the jurisdiction, and to the center of the district, so that the scanner listens to where you are as much as possible.  Of course the geographical data is based on a circle around a point, and no jurisdiction is a perfect circle, so there are times when you are near the border of a county or a police district where you will hear the one you are in and the next closest one, until you move a little further away.  But this is far better then listening to the entire RR database which often has it's geographical data mis-tagged or set to unreasonable ranges, resulting in hundreds of channels to scan.  My databases fix that problem.

I also do not include public works, aviation and other things like that in these databases.  They are the main police and fire channels, which is what interests me.  You can still trim it down even further by selecting the service types to listen to, as the channels are still tagged by service type.  So you can deselect "interop" or "law tactical" if you want to listen to even fewer channels.  How can you scan all that crap anyway?

This does not replace the RR data, since these are only favorites lists that you will load into your scanner.  It leaves the original RR data untouched, and you can continue to use it any time.  Radio reference has done an outstanding job with a massive task to produce their databases, and my hat is off to them.  But even so, it is still often just too much to listen to, and their geotagging leaves something to be desired.

One of the available third-party apps that can load favorites lists into the scanner is needed to load this data.  It is possible to just copy them to the SD card and then enter the favorites index manually with notepad, but it is a lot easier to manage using one of the available apps.  I recommend ARC Patrol, which can be purchased and downloaded here.

To install these, load my file in ARC Patrol and then transfer it to the HP1, and make sure to turn on location control if you want the list of what is scanned to track your location.  Then activate it as the current favorites list in use.  Even if you don't have a GPS, you can still use the zip code or Town name and then adjust the range up and down to get it to listen to what you want.

Note as of now, all these databases are for Uniden firmware version 2 release (extreme not required).  If you haven't updated your scanner to the latest release, you need to do that first.

Note on rebanding:  Rebanding is currently under way in this area.  These databases will be updated as systems reband.  To make the HP-1 work on a rebanded system, a custom channel plan has to be defined.  If you are using Bu-tel Arc-Patrol software to program your scanner, you need to go into the site settings, change the Mot Bandplan to Custom/Rebanded, and click Edit Mot Bandplan.  Then click Load Preset Bandplans: Rebandit and it will load the custom channel plan for a rebanded 800mhz system.  Click here for an image of what that screen should look like.

If you edit your favorites files manually (such as with Windows Notepad), then you need a line that looks like this right after the Site line in the favorite file:

BandPlan_Mot SiteId=1 851025000 854000000 25000 440 851012500 868987500 25000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Here are the databases currently available:

Alexandria VA Police & Fire (P25)

Alexandria VA (P25) & STARS Division 7

Arlington County VA Police & Fire (P25) (Rebanded)

Arlington County VA Police & Fire (P25) & STARS Division 7

Carroll County MD Sheriff & Fire (P25)

Culpeper County VA Sheriff & Police (Rebanded)

Fairfax County VA Police & Fire (P25) & STARS Division 7

Fairfax County VA Police & Fire (P25) (Rebanded)

Frederick County MD (P25) Sheriff & Fire

Howard County MD Police & Fire (Rebanded)

Loudoun County VA Sheriff & Fire (P25) (Rebanded)

New 2/23/21 Montgomery County MD Police & Fire (P25)

Prince George's County MD Police & Fire (P25)*

Prince William County VA Police & Fire (P25)

Virginia State Police Statewide STARS (P25)

Washington County MD Sheriff & Fire (P25)

 Washington DC Police & Fire (P25)**

Washington DC Metropolitan Area (all the above in a geotagged, drivable database.)

DOD LMR P25 Trunked Radio System (Andrews, Ft Meade, Ft Myer, Ft McNair, Ft Belvoir)

*Note that PG Police talkgroups are TDMA and you will not hear them on the scanner unless an FDMA radio has affiliated on the channel.  Start sending Uniden emails about when and if the HP1 is going to do TDMA...

**Note that MPD & FEMS has recently gone about 95% encrypted, so you will not hear any PD traffic any more except on Citywide 1.  Thank the criminals for this.  Expect more jurisdictions to follow suit in the future.

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Last Updated 03/17/2022